Back The Beard: Why Bernanke should be confirmed

There is, of course, some delicious irony is seeing the man who so politicized the Federal Reserve now getting caught in a political firestorm. Nevertheless, the Senate needs to quit playing around and confirm Ben Bernanke as Fed chairman before his term expires this weekend.

But voting down his confirmation at this point is going to do more harm to the nascent recovery. The markets already have been jittery over the prospect of a captainless Fed. That, as Edmund Andrews notes, is likely to result in “uncertainty, reluctance to invest and possibly higher interest rates if foreign investors began to worry about lax controls over inflation.”

More important, Bernanke was the guy who, more than anyone else in Washington, averted a global economic crisis last year. Regardless of how you feel about his approach, Bernanke’s motivation was clear.

That alone buys him the right to see his strategy through. Whoever runs the Fed in the coming years faces a delicate balancing act of easing off the liquidity accelerator without triggering a big jump in inflation. It doesn’t seem like a smart time to be swapping out the guy with his foot on that pedal.

Political threats against Bernanke seem aimed more at scoring political points than with concern about U.S. monetary policy. It’s a dangerous game for senators to gamble with the country’s economic future just to win a few votes back home. As Bob McTeer, who knows a thing or two about both the Fed and Bernanke, notes, it’s a sorry day when playing to the mob is mistaken for political leadership.

If the Senate does decide to vote Bernanke down, who will they get to replace him?